2. Christ in the Church

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"Behold, I am with you all days even unto the consummation of the world" (Mt. xxviii, 20).

If we ask the Catholic Church herself to tell us, according to her own notion of herself, what constitutes her essential nature and what is the substance of her self-consciousness, she answers us through the mouth of the greatest of her teachers, that the Church is the realization on earth of the Kingdom of God. "The Church of today, of the present, is the Kingdom of Christ and the Kingdom of Heaven": such is the emphatic assertion of St. Augustine (De civ. Dei xx, 9, 1). The "Kingdom of Heaven" and "Kingdom of God," taken up from the prophecy of Daniel (vii, 9-28) and proclaimed by Christ, that Kingdom which grows great like the mustard seed, and like leaven permeates the world, and which like a field of corn shelters both wheat and cockle until the harvest, this "Kingdom of Heaven" is, so the Church believes, implanted in her own being and there manifested. The Church believes that she is the manifestation of that newness and that supernature which come in with the Kingdom of God, the manifestation of holiness. She is the new supernatural reality brought by Christ into the world and arrayed in the garment of the transitory; she is the divine truth and grace presented under earthly veils.

And inasmuch as their fullness was creatively revealed in the Person of Christ, Paul, the Apostle of the Gentiles, expresses its deepest mystery when he borrows Hellenistic forms and calls the Church the Body of Christ (I Cor. xii, 27; Col. i, 18, 24; Eph. i, 22; iv, 12): "For in one Spirit were we all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Gentiles, whether bond or free; and in one Spirit we have all been made to drink" (I Cor. xii, 13).

Christ the Lord is the real self of the Church. The Church is the body permeated through and through by the redemptive might of Jesus. So intimate is this union of Christ with the Church, so inseparable, natural and essential, that St. Paul in his Epistles to the Colossians and Ephesians explicitly calls Christ the Head of the body. As the Head of the body Christ makes the organism of the Church whole and complete. And Christ and the Church can no more be regarded separately than can a head and its body (Col. i, 18; ii, 19; Eph. iv, 15 ff).

This conviction that the Church is permeated by Christ, and of necessity organically united with Him, is a fundamental point of Christian teaching. From Origen to Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius and thence to Thomas Aquinas, and thence on to our own unforgettable Mohler[1] this conviction stands in the center of the Church's doctrine. Her teachers delight to repeat in ever new forms those expressions of Augustine wherein he celebrates the mystical oneness of Christ and the Church: the two are one, one body, one flesh, one and the same person, one Christ, the whole Christ.[2] Nor could this intimate connection of Christ and the Church, this their intimate oneness, receive profounder or plainer expression than in the figure of a marriage of Christ and the Church which St. Paul, inspired by the language of several of the prophets (Osee i- iii; Jer. ii, 2; Is. liv, 5) is the first to employ (2 Cor. xi, 2). According to St. Paul the Church is the Bride of Christ, for whom He gave Himself. And with a like train of thought the Seer of the Apocalypse celebrates the "marriage of the Lamb," and sings of His "bride" that hath prepared herself (xix, 7-8). Later mystical theology wove out of these scriptural thoughts its wondrously sweet bridal mysticism, in which Christ is the lord, the Church His bride, and the two in closest union gene}ate the children of life.

This supernatural being of the Church expresses itself chiefly in her most primary creations, in dogma, morals and worship.

Her dogma aims at being nought else than the truths of Christ's revelation presented to our belief by her infallible authority, the glad tidings of all that precious reality, and all that abounding life which have entered this our actual world along with the Uncreated Word. The dogmas of Christology, in the narrower sense, delineate the Person of the God-man and describe the radiation of the glory of God in the face of Christ Jesus. The dogmas of Soteriology set forth His redemptive activity in His life, passion and death, and at the right hand of the Father. The dogmas that concern the Trinity lead us to the fundamental source of this divine life, to the bosom of the Father, and join the actual manifestation of Jesus to the eternal processions of the inner life of the Trinity. The dogmas of Mariology describe the bodily and natural relations of the Humanity of Jesus and His redemptive work to His own blessed Mother. The dogmas of Grace secure the character of the redemption as unmerited and due wholly to God, and fix the new basic mood of the redeemed, namely, love, peace and joy in the Holy Ghost. The dogmas that deal with the Church, the sacraments and the sacramentals, show how the new life that welled up in Christ is communicated to the men of all times and places. The dogmas of the Last Things set forth Jesus as the Judge and Fulfiller, and show how, when His redemptive work is complete, He gives back His lordship to the Father, that "God may be all in all."

Thus all the dogmas of the Catholic Church are stamped with the name of Christ; they would express each and every aspect of His teaching, they would bring the living, redeeming, ruling, judging Christ before our eyes according to all the dimensions of His historical manifestation.

And not otherwise is it with the Church's morality and with her worship. The fundamental object of all her educative work, of all her instruction, preaching and discipline, is to make the Christian a second Christ, an "alter Christus," to make him, as the Fathers express it, "Christ-like." This one highest aim of its endeavor gives Christian morality its inner unity. There is no two-fold morality in the Church, since there is but one Christ to be formed. But the ways and manners in which men strive towards this goal are infinitely various, as various as the human personalities which have to mature and grow up to the stature of Christ. Very many of the faithful will be able to form the image of Christ in themselves only in very vague and general outline. Yet, just as nature at times sees fit to give of her best and to manifest her superabundant power in some perfect types, even so the fullness of Christ which works in the Church breaks out ever and again in this or that saintly figure into brilliant radiance, in marvels of self- surrender, love, purity, humility and devotion. Professor Merkle's book[3] may provide even outsiders with some insight into the deep earnestness and heroic strength with which the Church in every century of her existence has striven after the realization of the image of Christ, after the translation of His spirit into terms of flesh and blood, after the incarnation of Jesus in the individual man.

And the worship of the Church breathes the same spirit, and is as much interwoven with Christ and full of Christ as is her morality. Just as every particular prayer of the liturgy ends with the ancient Christian formula: "Per Christum Dominum nostrum," so is every single act of worship, from the Mass down to the least prayer, a memorial of Christ, an "anamnesis Christou". Nay, more, the worship of the Church is not merely a filial remembrance of Christ, but a continual participation by visible mysterious signs in Jesus and His redemptive might, a refreshing touching of the hem of His garment, a liberating handling of His sacred Wounds. That is the deepest purpose of the liturgy, namely, to make the redeeming grace of Christ present, visible and fruitful as a sacred and potent reality that fills the whole life of the Christian. In the sacrament of Baptism—so the believer holds—the sacrificial blood of Christ flows into the soul, purifies it from all the infirmity of original sin and permeates it with its own sacred strength, in order that a new man may be born thereof, the re-born man, the man who is an adopted son of God. In the sacrament of Confirmation, Jesus sends His "Comforter," the Spirit of constancy and divine faith, to the awakening religious consciousness, in order to form the child of God into a soldier of God. In the sacrament of Penance Jesus as the merciful Savior consoles the afflicted soul with the word of peace: Go thy way, thy sins are forgiven thee. In the sacrament of the Last Anointing the compassionate Samaritan approaches the sick-bed and pours new courage and resignation into the sore heart. In the sacrament of Marriage He engrafts the love of man and wife on His own profound love for His people, for the community, for the Church, on His own faithfulness unto death. And in the priestly consecration by the imposition of hands, He transmits His messianic might, the power of His mission, to the disciples whom He calls, in order that He may by their means pursue without interruption His work of raising the new men, the children of God, out of the kingdom of death.

The sacraments are nought else than a visible guarantee, authenticated by the word of Jesus and the usage of the apostles, that Jesus is working in the midst of us. At all the important stages of our little life, in its heights and in its depths, at the marriage-altar and the cradle, at the sick-bed, in all the crises and shocks that may befall us, Jesus stands by us under the veils of the grace-giving sacrament as our Friend and Consoler, as the Physician of soul and body, as our Savior. St. Thomas Aquinas has described this intimate permeation of the Christian's whole life by faith in the sacraments and in his Savior with luminous power.[4] And Goethe, too, in the seventh book of the second part of his "Dichtung und Wahrheit," speaks warmly of it, and he closes his remarks with the significant words: "How is this truly spiritual whole broken into pieces in Protestantism, a part of these symbols being declared apocryphal and only a few admitted as canonical. How shall we be prepared to value some highly when we are taught to be indifferent to the rest?"

But the sacraments which we have enumerated are not the deepest and holiest fact of all. For so completely does Jesus disclose Himself to His disciples, so profound is the action of His grace, that He gives Himself to them and enters into them as a personal source of grace. Jesus shares with His disciples His most intimate possession, the most precious thing that He has, His own self, His personality as the God-man. We eat His Flesh and drink His Blood. So greatly does Jesus love His community, that He permeates it, not merely with His blessing and His might, but with his real Self, God and Man; He enters into a real union of flesh and blood with it, and binds it to His being even as the branch is bound to the vine. We are not left orphans in this world. Under the forms of bread and wine the Master lives amid His disciples, the Bridegroom with His bride, the Lord in the midst of His community, until that day when He shall return in visible majesty on the clouds of heaven. The Sacrament of the Altar is the strongest, profoundest, most intimate memorial of the Lord, until He come again. And therefore we can never forget Jesus, though centuries and millennia pass, and though nations and civilizations are ever perishing and rising anew. And therefore there is no heart in the world, not even the heart of father or mother, that is so loved by millions and millions, so truly and loyally, so practically and devotedly, as is the Heart of Jesus.

Thus we see that in the sacraments, and especially in the Sacrament of the Altar, the fundamental idea of the Church is most plainly represented, the idea, that is, of the incorporation of the faithful in Christ. And therefore the Catholic can only regard that criticism of the sacraments as superficial, which derives them, not merely in this or that external detail, but in their proper content and dominant meaning, from non-Christian conceptions and cults, as for instance from the pagan mysteries. On the contrary the sacraments breathe the very spirit of primitive Christianity. They, as instituted by Christ Himself, are the truest expression and result of that original and central Christian belief that the Christian should be inseparably united with Christ and should live in Christ. In Catholic sacramental devotion Christ is faithfully affirmed and experienced as the Lord of the community, as its invisible strength and principle of activity. In the sacraments is expressed the fundamental nature of the Church, the fact that Christ lives on in her.

Therefore dogma, morality and worship are primary witnesses to the consciousness of the Church that she is of supernatural stock, that she is the Body of Christ. But more than this, the same consciousness determines the spirit of her ordinances and laws, the special manner and method in which she would have her supernatural life realized, and especially her conception of authority and of sacrament. We have spoken of the supernatural life in the Church; let us now throw light on the special forms in which this life is presented.

Since the Church would be nought else but the Body of Christ, the realization in history of His divine and human Being, therefore the glorified Christ is the proper source of her power and authority, so much so that this authority is exercised only in His name and in the true and deepest sense belongs only to Him. The whole constitution of the Church is completely aristocratic and not democratic, her authority coming from above, from Christ, and not from below, from the community. The new powers come from Christ, the Incarnate God, and from Him flow through the apostles to the Church. That ancient African writer, Tertullian, stressed this fact as early as the second century in the pregnant sentence: "The Church is from the apostles, the apostles from Christ, Christ from God."[5] The apostles did not act in their own right, but as "sent" and as representatives of Christ: "He that heareth you, heareth me, and he that despiseth you, despiseth me; and he that despiseth me, despiseth Him that sent me" (Luke x, 16; cf. Mt. x, 40). And the apostles on their part, as the New Testament in general and the pastoral epistles in particular show us, appointed by imposition of hands, wherever they founded new communities, the "firstlings," i.e., the first converts, to be leaders (proestotes) who should, as St. Peter so strikingly and beautifully says (I Peter v, 2) "shepherd the flock of God" in their stead. So the apostolic authority did not reside in the communities, but in the elders, leaders, overseers, who were chosen by the apostles in the name of Christ to take their place. And after the death of the apostles it was these elders who transmitted the authority which had been committed to them, by the imposition of hands, and organized the new communities round men empowered with this authority. Certainly the communities played their part in the matter, and helped by their advice to determine who should be entrusted with the commission. But in itself the power was exclusively an apostolic power, a thing reserved to the bishops who derived from the apostles. We may assert that the whole literature of early Christianity attests this conception. It is developed with classic lucidity in one of the earliest of Christian writings, the "First Epistle of St. Clement" (Ad Cor. xliv, 3).

Therefore ecclesiastical authority rests upon the apostolic succession (successio apostolica), upon the uninterrupted communication by imposition of hands of that commission which the apostles received from Christ. This apostolic commission, as passed on from bishop to bishop right down to our own day, is, if we regard its inmost nature, nothing else than the messianic authority of Jesus. By means of the apostolic succession, this authority is perpetuated and imparts the truth and grace of Jesus to humanity. And, therefore, behind ecclesiastical authority stands Jesus Himself. As the scholastics put it, Jesus is the "principal cause" (causa principalis) of all functions exercised by the Church, their ultimate source and the basis of their efficacy. Man is only an instrument, the "causa instrumentalis," through whom Christ Himself acting in the Church teaches and sanctifies and governs. And so in the functioning of the Church, the human self, the human personality, the individual as such, falls wholly into the background. Not any human personality, but the redemptive might of Jesus controls the Church. The expression and resultant of this force is Church authority. The official authority of the Church is essentially a service of Christ (ministerium Christi), that is to say, a service which is fulfilled only in the name and by the commission of Christ, and derives its importance exclusively from the authority of Christ. It is true that the personality of the official may considerably affect the manner and method in which he carries out the will of Christ. Nevertheless the substance of his function, the core of his activity, is wholly independent of personal traits and weaknesses. For, however much they owe to personal gifts, his preaching and ministry are performed in the power of Christ; nor is it he that baptizes, but Christ baptizes through him. Therefore, Church authority, as thus conceived, derives immediately from the fundamental conviction that the Church is inwardly permeated by her "Lord." This is no unevangelical borrowing from pagan sources, or from Jewish or Roman law, but an expression of that primitive Christian thought: "It is Christ who evangelizes, Christ who baptizes." (Christus est, qui evangelizat, Christus est, qui baptizat.) So the aim of the Church in her official system is simply to secure that great and primary Christian idea that there is properly only one authority, only one teacher, only one sanctifier, only one pastor: Christ, the Lord.

Consequently such a conception of authority does not paralyze and petrify the believer, but enfranchises him, directing his gaze to Christ and Christ alone. No human authority, no extraneous personality, may stand between Christ and the believing subject. Divine truth, grace and life must flow into the soul directly from Christ Himself. Therefore— however paradoxical it may seem—the authority of the Church secures the liberty of the individual Christian, by its impersonal and extra-personal character. It protects that liberty from the spiritual domination and claims to mediatorship of alleged leading personalities, and sets Christ and the believer in direct contact with each other. Therefore the effect of such authority is not to separate, but to unite; or rather, it protects and secures that mysterious magnetic field and those wondrous magnetic forms which originate in the polarity of Christ and the soul. It protects and secures the direct contact and interplay of life between the Head and its members.

That is as true of the Church's teaching office as of her priestly and pastoral authority. For her teaching office also is subject to the word of the Lord: "One only shall be your teacher, Christ" (Mt. xxiii, 10). When the Catholic priest proclaims the word of God, Christ Himself preaches through him. Certainly this authority of Christ is most plainly and strikingly expressed in the doctrinal pronouncements of His Vicar; but it is present also in the preaching of the simple parish priest in his remote village church. "Christ Himself speaks through His disciples; His voice is heard through those whom He sends" (St. Augustine, "In ev. Joann.," xlvii, 5). All the doctrinal controversies of Christianity are dominated by this Christo-centric conception of the Church's teaching authority. It is because Christ is the sole canon of her preaching, that the Church adheres so obstinately and so rigidly to His traditional message. It is for this reason that she can endure no modernism, no fraternizing with the spirit of the age. Her teaching is, and aims at being, nothing else but a handing on of that message of Christ which was proclaimed by the apostles. St. Paul enjoined his disciple, Timothy, to guard that which had been committed to him (Timothee, custodi depositum! 2 Tim. i, 14; cf. 1 Tim. iv, 16; vi, 14). That is exactly the doctrinal program of the Church. Her conservatism and her traditionalism derive directly from her fundamentally Christo-centric attitude.

Rooted in this fundamental attitude the Church has always resisted the domination of leading personalities, of schools or movements. When any school of thought seemed to be obscuring or menacing the traditional faith, she has not hesitated to override even her greatest sons, an Origen, an Augustine, yes, in some points even a Thomas Aquinas. And whenever men have sought to interpret Christ's message, not by tradition, by firm adherence to history, to the original faith and to the uninterrupted fellowship, but by means of private speculation, from out of the limited experience of their little individual selves, then the Church has proclaimed her emphatic anathema. And she would utter this same anathema, even if an angel came down from heaven teaching aught else than what she has received from the apostles. The doctrinal history of the Church is simply an obstinate adherence to Christ, a constant carrying out of the command of Jesus: "One only shall be your teacher, Christ."[6]

Just as Christ stands behind the teaching office of the Church, so also He stands, more immediately still, as "Lord" of the community, behind her sacramental activity. Only one who overlooks this decisive fact can allege that "the scholastic conception of the efficacy of the sacraments reveals the primitive idea of the automatic effect, of the 'manna' of the sacred action."[7] According to Catholic theology the sacraments work "ex opere operato," and not "ex opere operantis;" that is to say that the sacramental grace (which, as distinguished from transient actual grace, effects a permanent union with God) is not produced and effected through the personal ethico-religious efforts of the recipient, but rather through the objective accomplishment of the sacramental sign itself; In every sacrament there is something objectively given (opus operatum), namely, the special conjunction according to the institution of Christ of a material element (the "matter") and certain words (the "form"). When this conjunction is effected in the recipient according to the intentions of the Church, then the sacrament is a "work of Christ" (opus Christi), which independently of the subjective share of the recipient (opus operantis) by force of its valid accomplishment causes the sacramental grace. Thus, in the case of baptism, when the water is poured upon the head of a child in the name of the Trinity, the child by the very performance of this act is admitted into the family of God. The heavens at once open and the Father's voice proclaims: "Thou art my beloved child."

Therefore the sacramental action does in fact transmit the Savior's grace "without any subjective factor," at least so far as regards the sanctification of an infant child. When it is a question of the sanctification of an adult who has attained religious and moral consciousness, the recipient must prepare himself subjectively for the grace which is objectively imparted in the sacramental act, by acts of faith, contrition and repentance. Therefore, according to the teaching of the Church, this ethico-religious effort of the adult is not the effective cause of his sanctification, its "causa efficiens," but only its preparatory cause, causa dispositiva. The effective cause of grace is exclusively Christ Himself, who proclaims and effects His gracious will through signs determined by Himself. Primarily, therefore, and "in actu primo," grace is a free gift and favor, a thing already guaranteed by the sacramental act apart from all personal effort. But whether I shall effectively grasp this grace which is thus provided and profit by it, that is to say, whether it will set up in me the state of justification or perfect that state, that depends on the earnestness with which I have opened my soul to the grace offered me and prepared myself for the reception of the sacrament. Therefore the Catholic conception of a sacrament, so far as regards the personal appropriation of the sacramental grace, presupposes the ethico-religious co-operation of the recipient. Can it then be alleged that this sacramentalism is akin to primitive magic, to the belief in a "manna" or something of the sort which makes certain special objects the conveyers of supernatural forces?

In fact, the criticism which thinks it right to speak of the sacraments as having a "magical character" divorces them from their proper and sole source, namely from Christ, the true and only giver of grace, and gives them an independent status. So that they become, not signs of grace, but independent sources of it, instruments endued with their own power, sacred charms. In reality, however, no sacrament stands thus in its own right, or can so stand for a single moment. It has its whole meaning and its whole power in and through Christ alone. Just as Christ, during His earthly life, did not disdain to connect his miracles of bodily healing with homely symbols (cf. Mark vii, 32; John ix, 6), so has He raised the sacraments in a new and higher sense to the position of specific instruments of His redeeming grace (causae instrumentales) in order to sanctify souls through them, through their visible and tangible reality. Nay, more, according to that Scotist view which is now advocated by many theologians, the sacrament itself possesses no strictly "physical" causality in any way immanent in its sign. On the contrary, the sacramental grace flows directly from Jesus into the soul of the believer. The sacrament is no more than an appointed sign of Christ, an objectivisation of the gracious will of Jesus, a visible and perceptible "I will, be thou made clean!"

Certainly it is true that even according to this view there remains something objective and impersonal in the notion of a sacrament. It remains true that the grace of Christ is not causally connected with the ethico-religious activity of the believer or the priest, but with the objective accomplishment of the sign. But why is that so? The very impersonal and objective character of the sacrament expresses that profoundest claim of the Church, her most intimate union with Christ, her working purely out of the fullness of Christ, her sanctifying through the might of Christ alone. Precisely because it is not the human element in her which sanctifies men, but the power of Christ alone, therefore the blessing of Christ is not tied to purely natural, human activity, not to the faith and repentance of the sinner, not even to the prayers and sacrifices of saintly, magnanimous souls and specially gifted personalities, whether saintly prophets, bishops, or priests, but to a wholly impersonal thing, a dead sign, which has no other merit save that of being a sign of Christ, a valid expression of His gracious will. The purpose, therefore, of the formula "ex opere operato," is to secure the deepest essence of Christianity, that thing for which St. Paul suffered and fought, the absolute unmeritedness of grace, and the thought that Christ is "all in all." And since this idea of the impersonality of the sacraments springs directly from the heart of Christianity, it is consequently as old as Christianity itself, and as old as the Body of Christ, the Church. Students of biblical theology emphasize the fact that the sacramental doctrine of St. John and St. Paul has already got this impersonal conception, that it recognizes an efficacy "ex opere operato," at least in effect, and is therefore completely Catholic in its character. And how could it be otherwise? When Christ is placed in the center, when we are told emphatically that of His fullness we have all received, then all human intermediaries must stand aside. There can be no human mediators, as Augustine remarked against the Donatists. Christ is the sole worker. When individual Christians in the Corinthian church attached themselves to various gifted personalities and formed a Peter party and a Paul party and an Apollo party, as though they would found their salvation upon these personalities, then St. Paul with the burning zeal of his witness for Christ cried out against this humanization of the Gospel. "What is Apollo and what is Paul? . . . His servants, through whom ye were made believers.... other foundation can no man lay but that which has been laid, which is Christ Jesus" (1 Cor. iii, 4-5, 11). The sacramental idea is nothing but the realization and maintenance of this basis of Christianity. In her age-long conflicts with Montanists, Novatians, Donatists, and again later on with Waldenses, Albigenses and Hussites, the Church reiterated the sentence of St. Augustine: "The sacraments sanctify through themselves, and not through men" (sacramenta per se sancta, non per homines). For man does not baptize, and man does not absolve, but Christ alone. When the Christian sacrament by this its impersonal character eliminates all human intermediaries, it secures an immediate and free exchange of life between the Head and the members. And so the freedom of the personal religious life is nowhere so perfectly safeguarded as in Catholic piety. And the forms of piety, in which the Catholic's sacramental experience of Christ achieves self-expression, are as manifold as the innumerable leaves of the trees.

There is yet something to be said about the relation of the pastoral office of the Church to the Head of the Church. St. John tells us (xxi, 15 ff.) that the risen Christ enjoined the apostle Peter: "Feed my lambs, feed my sheep." Peter is not to feed his own sheep, but Christ's sheep. So that the pastoral authority is plainly a delegated authority, and the pastor a deputy of Christ. That is the sort of authority which St. Paul exercises against the incestuous Corinthian; he gives him over "to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of our Lord Jesus Christ," and he does this "in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ" and "with the power of our Lord Jesus." Every disciplinary measure of the Church is inspired by her conviction that she is acting in the name and in the power of Jesus. It is true that the pastoral authority of the Church does not, like her teaching or priestly authority, point directly to certain supernatural realities which have been determined once for all by Christ's revelation, to the realities that is of doctrine and sacrament. Its object is rather to introduce these supernatural realities into practical life, to apply Christian rules and principles to the progressive and constantly changing life of nations and individuals. And in consequence there is no absolute certainty that all the particular measures of the pastoral authority are according to the mind and spirit of Christ.

So it is possible, as St. Augustine often insists, that the human element may obtrude itself and color the administration of Church discipline, and that there may be errors and mistakes. Yet, even though there be mistakes of detail, the luminous goal, the directive principles and the decisive means of Church discipline are—so the Catholic is convinced—determined by Christ, and pertain to His truth, love and power. The Catholic knows that the rule of the Church incarnates absolute truth, justice and love, and so he has solved the problem of Dostoievski[8]: Is not all human exercise of authority tantamount to a usurpation? Yes, if it be merely human, it is. For every merely human governance necessarily rests on might, whether it be the tyranny of an individual or the despotism of a community. Only in theocracy is a man free from men, for he serves not men but God. Therein lies the secret of that child-like obedience, so incomprehensible to the outsider, which the Catholic gives to his Church, an obedience whereby he freely and cheerfully submits his own little notions and wishes to the will of Christ expressed in the action of authority; an obedience whereby his own small and limited self is enlarged to the measure of the great self of the Church. That is no corpse-like obedience or slave mentality, but a profoundly religious act, an absolute devotion to the Will of Christ which rules the Church, a service of God. And so this obedience is not cowardly and weak, but strong and ready for sacrifice, manly and brave even in the presence of kings. It is faithful even to the surrender of earthly possessions, yes, even to the sacrifice of life itself, offering itself to the Christ who lives in the Church. This fidelity is instinct with the noble spirit of the faith. If a storm were to burst tomorrow over the Christian churches and their members were called upon to testify even unto death, I know not if all these communities would stand firm, strong and faithful, ranged round the one Christ; I know not if the bonds that in times of peace hold their members together would not be broken and utterly shattered, and those Christians blown like chaff before the wind. But one thing I know, that the bond which binds the Church and her members together will be broken by no devil and no demon. For it is not of this world. It is woven by the Church's "Lord," by the God-man, Christ Jesus.

Endnotes

1. John Adam Mohler (1796-1838), Professor of Catholic Theology in the University of Tubingen, a distinguished theologian and attractive personality, author of several remarkable books. The best known of these, "Symbolik," was translated into English in the last century by J. B. Robertson under the title "Symbolism, or Exposition of the doctrinal differences between Catholics and Protestants as evidenced by their symbolical writings" (London, 1843).

2. Unum, unum corpus, una eademque persona, unus Christus, totus Christus.

3. "Religiose Erzieher der katholischen Kirche aus den letzten vier Jahrhunderten" (Leipzig, n.d.), a series of Chapters on prominent Catholic "educators" (in a wide sense), beginning with St. Teresa of Avila and ending with Cardinal Newman.

4. "Summa Theologica, Pars tertia," Q. LXV, Art. l.

5. Ecclesia ab apostolis, apostoli a Christo, Christus a Deo ("De praescriptione," 37).

6. cf. St. Augustine: "Christus est, qui docet. Cathedram in caelo habet.... schola ipsius in terra est, et schola ipsius corpus ipsius est. Caput docet membra sua, lingua loquitur pedibus suis. Christus est, qui docet: audiamus, timeamus, faciamus ("De disciplina christiana," XIV, 15).

7. Heiler, op. cit., p. 221.

8. cf. "The Brothers Karamazoff."

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